What is the current thinking on design with regards to screen resolution.

Is it still most common to design to 800x600? or has 1024x?? taken over?

I go for 1024 by 768

the 800 x 600 guys can deal with the scroll bars. it does appear to be the middle ground.

pre made templates seem to come with options such as
'narrow': 800x600; 'wide': 1024x768; 'auto': fluid width

It also depands on the graphics as they can't stretch which creates some layout weirdness on the 1800+ resolutions.

I recently found this article, er...ah... blog at the dzone which was informative.
css-tricks.com/the-perfect-fluid-width-layout/

My latest site is fully liquid and looks equally good at any resolution anywhere from 800x600 to 2000x1500.

Only the smallest 640x480 resolution looks bad, and that is because there is a scroll bar in both directions.

i'm doing about 50/50 fully liquid, it depends on the type of site, blog sites in my opinion don't need to be fully liquid

fully fliud width is great for sites with tons and tons of content because it fits in without looking cluttered

so maybe another question to consider is

what types of sites are best fixed or fluid width?

Fixed width allows for more control on site layout. With fluid sites, paragraphs can get real wide on big screens if the person has their browser full width. When paragraphs spread across the screen real wide, they get hard to follow with the eyes. Narrow pages of text are easier to read.

I still design with 800 pixel widths in mind. Think it's a good idea to do that unless you have some special reason for making the pages wider. Many/most sites shouldn't be real wide.

i agree

Well now, I can add to this

The thing is - we should not be designing for screen resolution at all.

As screens get bigger the browser size used by the viewer is what we need to consider.

The actual browser size used is much smaller than what you imagine when you think in terms of screen resolution.

As things speed up and become more efficient the power user is actually multi-tasking with multiple browsers/windows open on their screen...it is becoming more rare for people to actually open a browser to full screen view.

Therefore, think carefully about the design in terms of usability when designing for fluid - does it compact & expand gracefully?

For fixed - a good standard is still for 800 (set at around 760) which will enable at least two side by side instances on the screen of the bigger screen users.

I agree - I use 2 x 1680x1050 monitors.

I normally have my browser window about 8-900 wide and almost the full height of the screen.

If I visit one of those really annoying sites that re-size the browser to full screen, I visit the BBC site and use it to re-size the browser. They are still using the 800 wide format I think. Whatever it is, it suits me.

I think I'll stick with the 800 format when specifying new websites for the time being.

Thanks everybody for the input.